Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Find Your People

Marcel Proust used to say that we are hopelessly alone. He was discouraging us from trying to be understood.

I have come to the conclusion that the hours I spend trying to persuade somebody are a complete waste of time. You mainly find people from three groups:

Those that does not understand, but they assent because don’t want to look stupid.

Those who dissent and argue with you.

Those who share your view but lack the guts to do something about it.

The three encounters are frustrating, so you resolve to keep everything to yourself. But by doing that you make it harder to the fourth group to find you. These are the people that not just share your values but actually act upon them.

At that moment, talking is equally wasteful. It’s the acts what constitute your race, your religion and your nation. I’m not talking about the group of people who borrow a set of values from a constitution and go blindly to die for it. I’m talking about people that engineer their own definition of happiness, based on self-acknowledge and unwavering principles.

That group is necessarily small, but that’s the only people you can authentically love. You don’t really love anybody because of your genes or because of a law telling you to do so. You love when you know that the other person and you are practically the same. This feeling can be induced with hormones - look how the mother wants to “eat” his baby with kisses - but as soon nature fulfills his goal the rush goes down. But if we take conscience control of the mechanisms of affection we can generate authentic human love; something that is not a compromise you take, but an essence you are.